Last week I made a Line-us drawing robot clone. Unfortunately I had no good way to make it draw easily. I thought I would give the CNC toolpath a shot. My goal is to have a super portable thing to generate conversation at meetups. If I used Easel it would allow anyone with a web connection to easily make something.

Grbl

The most compact machine controller is Grbl and I have a lot of experience with it. Grbl is designed to send step and direction signals to stepper motors. The draw ‘bot uses hobby servos. The nice thing about hobby servos is they don’t need to be homed. They have feedback to tell them where they are. They also don’t care about speed, acceleration or steps/mm. They just go wherever you tell them as fast as they can go. It occurred to me, the easiest way to hack this into Grbl was to not modify the Grbl code at all. I would let Grbl think it is using stepper motors. I would just add some extra code that runs on regular interval to tell the hobby servos where the stepper motors are in 3D space and they would be told to go there. I played around with some intervals and 8 times per second (8Hz) seemed to work pretty well. The ‘bot uses machine coordinates. The work coordinates are offset to the left because the ‘bot cannot draw at 0,0. The pen would crash into the frame.

PSoC

I recently port Grbl to PSoC. I used (3) 16bit PWM components to control the hobby servos. See this blog post on how I did that. I then attached a 8Hz clock signal to an interrupt. The interrupt sets a flag when it is time to update the servos. When the main code sees this flag it does the calculations and and sets the PWM values. Keeping the code out of the interrupts gets Grbl happier.

Easel

Easel is already setup to use Grbl. You can either import gcode or create a design right in Easel. I started out with importing gcode because the Benchy design was not in a format I could import. I created a template that shows the allowable work area. This will allow anyone to quickly create a drawing.

2D Benchy

I wanted to have a little fun with the first print. “Hello World” was not good enough. 3D printers use benchmark prints, so I thought I would do a 2D version of the classic 3DBenchy. To get a 2D drawing of 3DBenchy, I traced over an image with the line tool in CorelDRAW. I then exported a DXF of that.